Atlas Shrugged

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replastered his living room? . . . Oh well . . . Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to
judge his own need or ability. We voted on it. Yes, ma'am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a
year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us
just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars—rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us,
because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work
didn't belong to him, it belonged to 'the family,' and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he
had on them was his 'need'—so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher,
listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife's head colds, hoping that
'the family' would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because it's miseries, not work, that had
become the coin of the realm—so it turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming
that his need was worse than his brother's. How else could it be done? Do you care to guess what
happened, what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got away with the jackpot?
"But that wasn't all. There was something else that we discovered at the same meeting. The factory's
production had fallen by forty per cent, in that first half-year, so it was decided that somebody hadn't
delivered 'according to his ability’ Who? How would you tell it? 'The family' voted on that, too. They
voted which men were the best, and these men were sentenced to work overtime each night for the next
six months. Overtime without pay—because you weren't paid by tune and you weren't paid by work,
only by need.
"Do I have to tell you what happened after that—and into what sort of creatures we all started turning,
we who had once been human?
We began to hide whatever ability we had, to slow down and watch like hawks that we never worked
any faster or better than the next fellow. What else could we do, when we knew that if we did our best
for 'the family,' it's not thanks or rewards that we'd get, but punishment? We knew that for every stinker
who'd ruin a batch of motors and cost the company money—either through his sloppiness, because he
didn't have to care, or through plain incompetence—it's we who'd have to pay with our nights and our
Sundays. So we did our best to be no good.
"There was one young boy who started out, full of fire for the noble ideal, a bright kid without any
schooling, but with a wonderful head on his shoulders. The first year, he figured out a work process that
saved us thousands of man-hours. He gave it to 'the family,' didn't ask anything for it, either, couldn't ask,
but that was all right with him. It was for the ideal, he said. But when he found himself voted as one of our
ablest and sentenced to night work, because we hadn't gotten enough from him, he shut his mouth and his
brain. You can bet he didn't come up with any ideas, the second year.
"What was it they'd always told us about the vicious competition of the profit system, where men had to
compete for who'd do a better job than his fellows? Vicious, wasn't it? Well, they should have seen what
it was like when we all had to compete with one another for who'd do the worst job possible. There's no
surer way to destroy a man than to force him into a spot where he has to aim at not doing his best, where
he has to struggle to do a bad job, day after day. That will finish him quicker than drink or idleness or
pulling stick-ups for a living. But there was nothing else for us to do except to fake unfitness.
The one accusation we feared was to be suspected of ability. Ability was like a mortgage on you that
you could never pay off. And what was there to work for? You knew that your basic pittance would be
given to you anyway, whether you worked or not—your 'housing and feeding allowance,' it was
called—and above that pittance, you had no chance to get anything, no matter how hard you tried. You
couldn't count on buying a new suit of clothes next year—they might give you a 'clothing allowance' or
they might not, according to whether nobody broke a leg, needed an operation or gave birth to more
babies. And if there wasn't enough money for new suits for everybody, then you couldn't get yours,